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Holidays can be wonderful to celebrate. Punctuating the relentless flow of time, holidays add structure to our lives, giving us opportunities for reflection and for celebration. By observing holidays, marking some days as special, we try to make our lives more meaningful, more beautiful. Our anticipation of and preparation for holidays also helps to give meaning to the preceding days as well. From their origins as holy days, holidays are deeply linked to the practice of religion, linking timeless truths to the calendar which we use to measure the passage of time. Just as a year would seem emptier without, for example, Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter, so too would Christianity itself. Just what is it about these particular days that makes them so special, so holy?

For many Americans, Christmas is the quintessential holiday. Even those who refer to Christmas trees as “holiday trees” seem to concede the cultural prominence of Christmas among holidays. While this overwhelming popularity has led to the lamentable commercialization of Christmas, that the holiday is such big business is itself testament to the level of importance so many attach to it. For many, celebrating Christmas turns a dark, cold season into the most wonderful time of the year. Just what is it about this particular holiday that is worthy of such celebration? At its root, Christmas is about the joyous, long-awaited, much-hoped- for arrival of a child as a sign of God’s love for us into a world weary from suffering and oppression. While the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus is a unique event, how many times every day do children, formed in the image and likeness of God, arrive to joyful expectant families, giving hope for the future in the face of our flaws and mortality?

As birth foreshadows death, so Christmas foreshadows Good Friday. Despite all the love and hopes that might welcome us into this life, we are all destined to suffer and to die. This suffering can be the result of natural evils, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, cancer, and disease, or, more insidiously, of evils brought about by human agency, such as bigotry, oppression, and war. The crucifixion of Jesus is paradigmatic of human injustice and evil, condemning another to die so that we might live, having what we want at the expense of others’ suffering. It seems ironic that the most embarrassing, saddest day of the Christian calendar is called Good Friday. Yet, how many times each day to people created in God’s image suffer and die as a result of human selfishness and evil? While Christians believe the cross and death of Jesus Christ is of unique significance, how much of human history is littered with crosses, both literal and figurative? How might we condemn others to die by our indifference and malice?

Good Friday can only be made sense of as good in the light of Easter. For Christians, Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday makes it the holiest, and the most joyful, of holidays. From the seeming defeat of Good Friday comes God’s ultimate triumph, raising Jesus from the dead, revealing that human injustice, evil, and death do not have the final word. The women who went to the tomb that Sunday morning, becoming the first witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, were there to anoint his corpse. How the initial darkness of their grief and despair must have rendered their joy in learning the good news all the more illuminating, ecstatic, complete! While the day the resurrection of Christ was first revealed to humanity will always deserve a blessed place on the calendar, is the resurrection any less true, or any less a cause for joy, on any other day?

While certain days will always have special meaning, that which makes the best of them special holds equally true every single day of every year. The anticipation and joy that observing holidays gives us can be ours at all times. “Rejoice always,” the apostle Paul enjoins in 1Thessalonians 5:16. Of all the commandments in the Bible, this one is about as unheralded as it is a challenge to observe. The daily grind, with all its struggles and cares, can eventually wear us down, stealing life’s joy. Dealing with the  many challenges life throws at us while still managing to make ends meet takes so much out of us. Although life is a precious gift, the weight of suffering and injustice can make it feel like a burden. Any philosophy truly worthy of the name (or of our time) should help us to find meaning, happiness, and joy, giving order to the apparent chaos of our lives. It is from this need that our desire to celebrate holidays originates. The true significance of any holiday is to realize how its meaning informs our entire lives, bringing joy to every day of our lives.

Ours is an increasingly individualistic culture of self-promotion characterized by social media, iGadgets, selfie sticks, and virtue signaling. We devote so much energy to being thought well of; we want others to think of us as we want to think of ourselves, as successful, moral, intelligent, better than average. In such a context, humility seems downright retrograde. Humility and its cognates conjure humus, soil, as in being low as dirt. Who would ever want to be thought of as lesser, smaller, weaker, in short, as pathetic? Why on earth should anyone think humility is commendable, let alone a virtue?

Rather than continue playing word association games, let us seek a definition. Following Thomas Aquinas, my teacher James Keenan defines humility as “the virtue of knowing one’s place.” Such an understanding of humility excludes self-loathing; knowing your place does not mean thinking of yourself as less than you really are. For people suffering from low self-esteem, humility entails realizing your life has value, that you are worthwhile, that you are capable of important and meaningful things.

We shouldn’t let ourselves get carried away, however. The opposite of humility is pride, the vice of thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought. In the Bible pride is the first sin committed, the sin which brings about the fall of humanity described in Genesis 3. In their pride the man and woman reject their rightful place as beloved creatures of God because they want to be like God themselves. The price of this pride is the destruction of relationships. It’s difficult to love others when you think you’re better than them. If you can’t accept yourself as the person you really are, then you can’t truly love yourself either.

For theologians, those who attempt to speak about the divine mystery, humility poses a special challenge. God radically transcends our understanding, rendering all our words utterly inadequate. Recognizing this, how dare we say anything at all? How much damage has been done to the standing of theology, and of religion in general, by its practitioners pronouncing on subjects beyond their understanding? The commandment not to take the name of God in vain seems applicable to such proud pretensions of knowledge. Far from making faith in God more credible, such presumptuousness often has the opposite effect, bringing faith into disrepute. Would it not be better, more honest, humbly to admit that we do not have all the answers. Faith in God is a journey into infinite mystery, not the means by which we can know everything about everything (a goal of which we are incapable of attaining in any case).

For one of the foundational figures of Western philosophy, humility is the beginning of wisdom. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates accounts for his reputation for wisdom, “I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser…at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.” Humbly recognizing our own ignorance opens us to wonder, to ask questions, to dialogue with others, to learn. In contrast, when we claim to have definite knowledge already we close ourselves off, precluding any learning. In a similar vein, Augustine holds in his De Doctrina Christiana that humility is a prerequisite, not only for interpretation of the Scriptures, but ultimately for understanding God’s love for us.

A lack of humility thus might help to explain the indignant divisiveness currently roiling our society. Thanks to technology, we are inundated with far more information than we can effectively process. It is harder than ever to know our place when the entire world seems to be at our fingertips. We are regularly bombarded with distressing news of injustices, tragedies, atrocities happening across the globe. How can someone respond meaningfully to the immensity of what is wrong in our world? We can post on social media denouncing those we believe are to blame (including those who dare to disagree with us), or advocate for policies we are certain will fix a problem (if only people had listened to us sooner!), thus earning plaudits from the like-minded. But how much concrete good can that achieve? Although we are more acutely aware of all its ills, humility reminds us that we are not able to save the world—only God can do that. Accepting the limitations of our knowledge and ability, we can still do our small part to help heal the world by doing what is right in our own lives. Our place includes being a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a citizen. The best way to do good and find God in our lives is not to think of ourselves, but to give of ourselves to build up those in our midst.

By its very name, theology is the rational attempt by human beings to communicate the infinite mystery of God in words—no mean feat! If we follow Anselm’s line of reasoning in the Proslogion (the title itself is a reference to discourse) that God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought,” then God ultimately transcends our ability to understand. Rather than a proper noun expressing something known, our word “God” is actually a heuristic device, a sign connoting the infinite mystery which surrounds the finite human mind like a raft floating in the middle of the ocean, or the solitary beam of a flashlight shining in the inky blackness of night. As the vast corpus of literature produced by Christian theology over the past 2,000 years attests, no amount of human words can ever be adequate to communicate the infinite mystery of the divine. Since this is only a blog post rather than an expansive tome, a different approach is needed. Let us seek to be as concise as we can, if possible, to distill the essence of theology into a single word.

The first truth of human existence is that it is a gift. Our life is something which we have received; our being is given to us. None of us gets to choose to be born. While in the immediate sense we receive our life from our parents, the ultimate origin of the spark which gives life to the wet dust of bodies is a mystery to us. Even after birth, that which is given to us forms the warp and woof with which we weave our lives: from our bodies to the food we use to sustain them, from the myriad technologies we use to the understanding behind them, from the culture which shapes us to the communities in which we live, from the language we learn to communicate ourselves to our very names. Even in the face of injustice, affliction, suffering, and despair, we are nevertheless blessed just to be alive. We have been loved into being.

Belief in God is a way of affirming this given-ness of our being. Ultimately, we cannot account for the existence of the universe, or even of our own lives. That there is something rather than nothing is an awesome miracle. That we ourselves exist is no less miraculous. In the midst of the inconceivable vastness of space and time, we are here, alive, part of an ecosystem of interrelated living things, including a community of our fellow human beings. In us, the dust of stars has been brought together into a living consciousness capable of self-reflection, free choice, understanding, communication, and, most remarkably, loving. To believe in God is to recognize that our existence is an otherwise incredible gift.

Thus, we return to our original question. How can we use words to communicate the God who has given us such an overwhelming gift? The proper response to a gift is recognition and gratitude. This can most succinctly be expressed with the words my parents taught me, “thank you.” However, this is two words. More eloquent still is the Spanish, “gracias.” This word carries with it the connotation of grace. In common usage, grace refers to the practice of consciously giving thanks before a meal. For theologians, grace refers to God’s gift to human beings. Although God is infinite and transcends our understanding, it is possible for us to discern that we have been given an inestimable gift and ought to respond with gratitude, by giving thanks. It is from this simple beginning that the task of theology proceeds, trying to make sense of this gift.